Do curveballs really curve?

Der Speigel has an update on Curveball, the notorious hero of the left who has become near legendary for single-handedly causing the Iraq war based on drunken fabricatio..

We interrupt this narrative for breaking news...

A video recording of a meeting between Saddam and Yasser Arafat on April 19, 1990, showed Saddam threatening to assassinate then president George Bush. "We may not be able to reach Washington, but we could send someone with an explosives belt to Washington," Saddam told Arafat, three months before the invasion of Kuwait.

"We can send people to Washington. A man with an explosives belt could throw himself on Bush's car."

Taken from the captured Harmony documents found in Iraq, of which only 15 percent have been translated into English.

ns. Being Speigel they tossed in the obligatory "neocons" and "warmongers" when describing the Bush administration, but all in all it's an interesting look at a true enigma and leaves hanging many of the same questions asked after the last Curveball story in late 2007. In a nutshell:

> Why did he choose Germany? Did Deutchland display a friendlier attitude to Middle Easterners compared to other European countries? After all, Atta headquarted his 9/11 cell in Hamburg around the same time Curveball arrived.

> Why did he continue the lie after 9/11 and especially after Bush started talking about nailing Saddam? Seems the self-preservation instinct would have prompted a gradual walk back of the cat after he realized how serious things were getting. As far as we know, he's never admitted to lying and we there's no disagreement that he worked in the CDEC facility.

> Why is the BND still protecting him? Euro-liberal guilt? Fear of embarrassment via interviews to western or eastern media? Something else entirely?

> Why did Iraq put him in a top secret bio facility if his character was so poor and he got D grades in college? Connections? This facility was overseen by Hussein (not Barack) Kamel, Saddam's late son-in-law who famously defected in 1995 and told the UN of an extensive bioweapons program in Saddam's past (but claimed everything had since been destroyed).

> Why did Saddam ever allow such a person to leave and get away with it? When he left in 1998 Saddam and the UN had reached a showdown and the bombing was about to began. Does it strain credulity to think Saddam might have sent agents out with hopes they'd be caught and tell western governments what he wanted them to hear? Perhaps Curveball decided to turncoat. His mother said he had American posters on the wall in his room.

Maybe Curveball is living proof of the failure of the Bush presidency and illustrates how dangerous conventional wisdom can be when coupled with two terror attacks in the span of two months, one which featured the very same substance he was warning about, with a president well-schooled in the business of oil but little else. Or perhaps it illustrates that the curveball itself is merely an illusion.